Bodies Politic (Picturing History)

by RoyPorter (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.25

  This text takes a critical look at representations of the body, in death, disease and health, particularly in medical contexts, and images of the healing arts in Britain from the mid-17th to the beginning of the 20th century. The two key assumptions are that the human body is the chief signifier and communicator of all manner of meanings - religious, moral, political and medical alike - and that pre-scientific medicine was an art which depended heavily on performance, ritual, rhetoric and theatre.